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The Herald Scotland
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
"Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing": The Mortician
Anyone doubting the vitality and importance of what we might call the cinema of opposition had only to glance at their news feed when the Academy Awards and the Palme d'Or were handed out. In March, a documentary about life under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank won the Oscar for Best Documentary, while in May veteran Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi won big at Cannes with the regime-baiting It Was Just An Accident. Over the decades Panahi has regularly been imprisoned and harassed, though he continues undeterred. During one bout of house arrest he shot a documentary and smuggled it to Cannes on a flash drive hidden in a cake. True to form, It Was Just An Accident was shot in Iran in secret and without permissions. His travails put funding rejections from Screen Scotland into perspective. Happily, this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is platforming similarly challenging works. There's a screening of Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk, Sepideh Farsi's documentary about 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona, killed along with 10 relatives in an Israeli airstrike in April. Meanwhile, in the EIFF's competition strand, there's a welcome return for Canada-based Iranian exile Abdolreza Kahani, whose film A Shrine screened at last year's festival where it drew much praise. Filmed and set mostly in a bleak, snow-bound Montreal but with all dialogue in Persian, The Mortician follows Iranian expat Mojtaba (Nima Sadr) in his job washing the bodies of the deceased in accordance with Islamic tradition. It seems to be a semi-official sinecure, paid for by the Iranian state from an near-empty office run by a stern official with a military bearing. Mojtaba, in contrast, is saggy, baggy and looks eternally perplexed, shuffling from job to job to make the money he sends home to help his eight siblings and their disabled father. Most clients are dead, obviously, though not all. One wants to be washed alive – he thinks it will cure his insomnia – but finds the process too ticklish. Another, a woman, wants her party-loving daughter to practice so she can wash her grandmother when she dies and by doing so absorb some of the old woman's virtue. Read More And then there's Jana (Gola, an Iran-born singer and actress now based in London). An exiled singer of protest songs which are fiercely critical of the Iranian regime, she contacts Mojtaba with a most curious request. It takes him into her secluded rural home and into her life, and sees him partner her in a dangerous project. 'How many more songs are needed for change?' she asks him. 'Something bigger has to happen.' In a sense, The Mortician is a portrait of a diaspora, but one in which paranoia runs deep. Nobody trusts anybody Jana most of all. 'Delete all your apps,' she tells Mojtaba before his first visit. Elsewhere Kahani turns that feeling into visual motifs: misted-up windows and mirrors, reflections, close-ups of smartphone screens. These all hint at surveillance and scrutiny. As we will learn, the suspicions are not misplaced. Virtually all the music is diagetic – there is no soundtrack – and Kahani's style is avowedly, almost religiously naturalistic, all of which adds oomph to the film's abrupt, shocking ending. That feeling is rendered even more powerful by what follows: a coup de théâtre the director unveils just when you expect the credits to roll. Uh-uh, he says, instead delivering a sort of written manifesto in which he thanks himself for refusing funding from the Iranian state and explains how he shot the film entirely alone, on a smartphone, in an urgent need to make what he calls 'solo cinema'. 'If I have a phone and a mic, I'm ready,' he states. And how. Audacious, gripping, affecting and disturbing, The Mortician is a bold call to arms from a film-maker who is as defiant as he is resourceful. The Mortician screens as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 17-18
Indian Express
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The Mortician review: HBO true crime series ends with a scandalous confession designed to shock and awe
Depending on where you live in the world, the first episode of HBO's new true crime series, The Mortician, will either be scandalous or sloppy. In the 1980s, a man named David Sconce took over his family's respectable funeral home business, and took it in an altogether macabre direction, all in the name of aggressive expansion. But the sort of shenanigans that he got up to would hardly draw a second glance in India. A lot of what he was convicted of doing would be brushed off as 'jugaad' here. In the United States, however — especially the wealthy Pasadena neighbourhood where Sconce conducted his activities — a scandal erupted. It was discovered that Sconce was mass-cremating bodies and essentially scooping out ashes from large barrels, and presenting them to the families of the deceased. They had no idea that the urn being given to them contained the remains of several dead people mixed together, and not just their loved one. Sconce said that this was a common practice in funeral homes, and that most businesses would be lying if they pretend that it wasn't. You could imagine white people getting all hot and bothered about something like this, but in India, where the cost of human life is negligible, it would be more surprising if there was no skullduggery going on. Also read – Last Stop Larrimah movie review: The best true crime documentary of the year so far; stranger-than-fiction storytelling at its finest Although the first episode of The Mortician ends on this rather underwhelming note, things only get more shocking from there. It is revealed that Sconce's own parents — they were pillars of the community — had warned his would-be wife about him, and that, too, on the day of their marriage. It's enough to hook you in. The three-part series also features interviews with the ex-cons that Sconce hired to do the dirty work for him. But it's one thing to hear stories of how these men squeezed dead bodies into incinerators without a care for who's who. It's another thing to hear them admit that they were stealing all the jewellery and gold off these bodies for Sconce to sell off. In total, he is said to have cremated over 20,000 people. He presumably stole the jewellery off most of them. He is also said to have sold off their kidneys, livers, and brains to the highest bidder. Things get murkier when Sconce's business rivals begin dropping dead, shortly after having threatened to tell on him. Not only does the show bring back several of Sconce's old associates, it also features news reporters, members of the community who were conned by him, and other assorted characters who had run-ins with him over the years. Not a single one of them has a nice thing to say about Sconce. He's described as the kind of guy who'd always have a gun on his person, and was routinely finding ways to scam the system. At one point in the '80s, his business was booming to such a degree that he set up a new facility a few miles out of town. He got caught because a Holocaust survivor living in the area was triggered by the smell of burning flesh in the air. He told the authorities that it reminded him of the concentration camps; he was sure of it. Sconce's arrest proved one thing: he might've been a good businessman, but he was a lousy criminal. For one thing, he wouldn't stop threatening to kill people; for another, he was always risking what he had by attracting more and more attention to himself. In an unexpected coup, the filmmakers are able to get Sconce himself to sit down for an extended interview. While he admits to having conducted mass cremations and robbed the bodies off all their valuables, he absolutely denies having anything to do with his dead rivals. Read more – Fred and Rose West – A British Horror Story review: Netflix delivers a true crime tale of Nithari-level nastiness; a deeply upsetting peek at pure evil Unlike the many true crime series on Netflix, The Mortician is a far classier affair. The tone isn't lurid; it doesn't come across as exploitative. Most notably, it doesn't have the look and feel of something that was shot over an afternoon. The filmmakers have taken great care to give Sconce's many victims a chance to speak about the trauma he inflicted upon them by desecrating the bodies of their family members. Others reflect on how tragic the case proved to be for the largely peaceful Pasadena community. Nothing, however, can prepare you for the show's climax. It would be improper to reveal what happens. But a direct comparison could be made to the conclusion of another HBO true crime documentary; certainly, The Mortician isn't interested in leaving things open to interpretation. It has a firm idea about Sconce, and it does everything that a non-fiction series can do — editing, music, framing — in order to make this stance crystal clear. The Mortician isn't top-tier true crime, but it sure comes close. The Mortician Director – Joshua Rofé Rating – 4/5 Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police. You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mortician' Becomes HBO's Most-Watched Documentary Series In Over 5 Years
EXCLUSIVE: The Mortician is piquing audience interest for HBO. The three-part documentary series, which chronicles the inhumane practices at a funeral home in Southern California, debuted on June 1. Since then, the show has tallied more than 2.6M cross-platform viewers in the U.S., per the network. More from Deadline 'Love Island USA' Season 7 Sets New Bar For Series, Soaring Past 1B Minutes Viewed In Week After Debut, Per Luminate HBO's Steve Carell Comedy Series Adds Annie Mumolo 'Somebody Somewhere's Tim Bagley On Finding The Humor In The "Depth And Darkness" Of Life & Showing The "Openness Of Your Heart" In Song It's now the most-watched HBO documentary series in over five years. That means it's beat out some high profile documentaries like Pee-wee as Himself, Chimp Crazy, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God and more. This is certainly a strong performance for the series, likely aided by the vote of confidence from HBO to place it in the network's marquee 9 p.m. Sunday night slot, following on the heels of The Last of Us, The White Lotus and The Gilded Age. That generally has signaled to viewers that a series should be on their radar and thus can be a force for driving engagement. The Mortician follows a trusted family-owned funeral home that hid behind a façade of decency and propriety to take advantage of loved ones at their most vulnerable moments. In the early 1980s, David Sconce, scion of the Lamb family, took over the family business and sought to exploit the deceased in numerous ways to expand their earnings. Driven by profit, the Lamb Funeral Home in Pasadena, California engaged in years of morally questionable and inhumane practices. Featuring an exclusive interview with Sconce, newly released from prison, the series examines the lucrative and ubiquitous multibillion-dollar mortuary industry and illuminates what can happen behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. With emotional interviews with families of the victims of the Lamb Funeral Home and revelations from former employees, The Mortician unravels a dark, troubling story that involved mass cremations and stealing from the dead in a multitude of macabre ways. The scandal shook Southern California and as members of the family stood trial, the funeral industry took heed, bringing about tighter regulations and allowing for greater transparency into the business of death. A testimony from Sconce, who tells his side of the story with animated energy and candor, anchors the series. The HBO unscripted series is directed and executive produced by Joshua Rofé and executive produced by Steven J. Berger for Number 19 and Strong Baby's Jonah Hill and Matt Dines. Best of Deadline 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Fubar' Season 2 Debut Barely Makes Netflix Weekly TV List Amid Steep Audience Decline As ‘Ginny & Georgia' Remains On Top
Arnold Schwarzenegger's FUBAR returned for its second season last week, but it appears audiences had other streaming priorities. Season 2 generated about 2.2M views in its opening weekend after debuting on June 12, placing it at No. 10 on the weekly Netflix Top 10 English TV charts. That's quite a fall from grace compared to the first season, which racked up about 11M views during its own premiere weekend back in May 2023. More from Deadline 'The Mortician' Becomes HBO's Most-Watched Documentary Series In Over 5 Years 'Land Of The Lost' Series Reboot In Works At Netflix From Legendary Television 'Love Island USA' Season 7 Sets New Bar For Series, Soaring Past 1B Minutes Viewed In Week After Debut, Per Luminate Instead, Ginny & Georgia Season 3 was the big winner, managing 16.9M views from June 9 to 15. It was comfortably atop the English TV list for the week. Once again, Seasons 1 and 2 also benefitted from the popularity of the new season. Season 2 came in fifth place with 4.2M views, while Season 1 took sixth with 3.3M. In second place was The Survivors, an Australian whodunit series that tallied 9M views in its second week on the streamer. Sirens also continued to perform fairly well, coming in third place with 4.3M views. That was closely followed by crime thriller Dept. Q in fourth place, also with 4.3M views. As for the film side of things, Tyler Perry's Straw picked up an impressive 48.9M views, making it both the biggest week this year for a movie and the biggest week for a 2025 launch. That's a positive sign that we may see it eventually land among Netflix's most popular English films of all time. Audiences also revisited the OceanGate submersible disaster in the new Netflix documentary Titan, which premiered recently at Tribeca Film Festival. The film took in 17.4M views, putting it at No. 2 on the weekly English films list. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery 'The Buccaneers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
HBO's Gruesome True-Crime Doc Tried to Have Its Bombshell Moment. There's Just One Problem.
Joshua Rofé's docuseries The Mortician, which finished its run on HBO last night, doesn't tell us anything about its central character over the course of its three hourlong episodes that we don't know from the very beginning. It's clear practically from the instant that David Sconce, the scion of a Southern California funeral home dynasty who ran a yearslong scheme involving illegal bulk cremation and the mutilation of corpses, is as unrepentant as he is shady, a man who offers to tell the filmmakers everything because he's fundamentally lacking in remorse. But what's increasingly astonishing, throughout the episodes, is just how much Sconce is who he appears to be: the platonic ideal of a conscienceless grifter who will always find a way to justify his actions. The series initially presents Sconce as a bad seed, a golden-haired high school football star who was forced into the family business after a knee injury ended his athletic career. On his mother's side, Sconce is a descendant of the Lambs, a storied 'old Pasadena' family who had run the Lamb Funeral Home since the 1920s. Generations of locals trusted them implicitly, which gave Sconce ample opportunity to betray that trust. Placed in charge of the family's crematorium in the 1980s, he came up with a plan to slash prices and boost volume, going from under 200 to over 25,000 cremations annually in less than five years. Sconce did this not by building a large new facility, industrializing a largely family-run industry at a previously unheard-of scale. He did it the old-fashioned way, if by old-fashioned you mean the 18th century. Sconce and his employees, who were mostly ex–football players with drug habits or criminal records or both, would compete to see which of them could cram more bodies into a single oven at the same time, breaking or severing whatever extremities it took to fill it to bursting. When the crematorium burned down after one helper got too high to keep an eye on it, Sconce simply relocated to a new facility in nearby Hesperia, using ceramics kilns in the place of ovens. The smoke, which got so bad that one of Sconce's accomplices ran a phone line out to his car so he wouldn't have to stay inside the building, eventually drew the ire of local residents, and when the authorities came to investigate, one of them recognized the smell—as a soldier, he'd helped liberate Auschwitz. But as The Mortician's later episodes make clear, Sconce's rotten apple didn't fall far from the family tree. His habit of harvesting organs and gold teeth—which he called 'popping chops'—from corpses was already Lamb family practice, and his mother, Laurieanne, according to an auditor from the California Funeral Board, regularly skimmed profits from preneed accounts, which allow families to set aside money for funeral expenses in advance. One subject says Laurieanne kept a container of miscellaneous ashes on hand, along with a table of how much ash a cremated body typically yields, so that she could, for example, spoon the missing amount into a baby's urn to make up for the issue that the family had already sold to a third party. (Sconce himself points out that selling body parts is illegal, but charging for the labor it takes to procure them is not.) It's not clear whether the Lambs were always crooks or whether things went sour between one generation or the next, but it's safe to say that by the time David came along, the clan's skulduggery was already established practice. The Lambs' fellow morticians wax nostalgic about how ethical the funeral industry was before the Sconce scandal unleashed a wave of new regulations, but none of them reflects on why their colleagues were too keen to question why the cost of cremation suddenly dropped by three-quarters. If they didn't know, it can only be because they didn't want to. The series interviews several people whose loved ones were left in the care of the Lambs and handed what they now know was a pile of ash that had little if any connection to the person they mourned. (One individual also found out during the Lambs' trial that her family members' hearts had been removed first from their bodies.) But, ultimately, The Mortician keeps getting drawn back to Sconce, whose cold-blooded certainty is treated as if it's more interesting than the victims' grief. Those who handle the dead for a living naturally have to learn to regard bodies with a certain clinical distance, but Sconce's total lack of empathy is more like sociopathy than professional remove. 'That's not your loved one anymore,' he tells the camera, as if he's still arguing with bereaved family members decades after the fact. 'It's just potash and lime.' One day, his ex-wife says, he came home with a Styrofoam cup full of teeth and, without so much as a word, plopped down on the garage floor to break out the gold fillings. Small wonder, then, that he may have come to regard the living with the same disdain. Despite years of effort, neither the authorities nor the filmmakers were able to tie him definitively to the 1985 murder of Timothy Waters, a rival mortician who was preparing an exposé on Sconce's methods for an industry trade publication—or even, for that matter, to prove that Waters was murdered at all. His death was initially ruled a heart attack, and although Sconce was charged with first-degree murder and preliminary tests found traces of oleander—a natural poison that can stop the heart—Waters' body had decayed so much by the time the case came to trial that no evidence could be found, and the charge was dropped. (The specialist who performed the tests compares Waters' liver with 'chocolate pudding.') Sconce's associates say he bragged about committing the crime, but with a habitual liar, it's hard to know what the truth might actually be. But, like too many contemporary true-crime documentaries, The Mortician isn't satisfied with merely questioning truth; it has to provide it. So Rofé ends with a Jinx-style stinger: Sconce apparently, or at least plausibly, confessing to three murders. Exactly which three is difficult to say—Waters', perhaps; an employee of Sconce's who was found hanged after threatening to quit; and, most suggestively, an unnamed man who tried to rob Sconce and his wife at gunpoint. Sconce has just begun to tell the story, prompted only by Rofé asking if there's anything else he'd like to say, when the cameraperson announces that they have to reload, and Sconce regains enough control to say he'll tell the story only off-camera. But he does say it's one of three 'things I can't talk about'—three being the number of murders an anonymous former employee suggests, elsewhere in the film, that Sconce may have carried out. Rofé told the Guardian that Sconce is 'clearly implying serious crimes have been committed.' But, considering there's no suggestion whom that mystery victim may have been, it's a wan note to end the series on, more of a damp squib than a bombshell. (The most materially suspect aspect is when Sconce, who previously claimed he 'wasn't a gun guy,' goes into detail about the handgun he usually kept in his driver's-side door.) The last-minute equipment malfunction inevitably recalls the end of Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, whose pivotal interview was captured only on audio cassette due to a broken camera. But, as Morris has pointed out many times since, there's a big difference between leveraging a movie to prove a condemned man's innocence and using one to point toward his guilt. Nearly four decades later, the influence of Morris' landmark movie is like a massive planet, pulling lesser satellites into its orbit. But few of them have the goods to be its equal, and most just end up as rubble.
